Page 13 of We All Live Here
She puts the phone down, then on impulse reaches abruptly for Celie’s bag.
Celie snatches it back. “What are youdoing?”
“Where is it?”
“Let go!”
“The weed! Where is it?”
Lila tugs at Celie’s bag, but she pulls it back, and for a brief, almost comical minute, they are seated on the wall, playing tug-of-war with the canvas satchel.
“Oh, my God! Stop!”
Celie manages to drag the bag back to her, and jumps off the wall, her face puce with anger.
“You can’t smoke weed, Celie!”
“God, you’re so embarrassing! Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
“Because I’m your mother!”
She is still standing on the pavement yelling her daughter’s name as Celie shoves her bag under her arm and half runs, half walks away, back toward the bus stop.
“It’s my job!” Lila calls, and her voice is caught on the wind along with the empty takeaway cartons, and disappears.
It is at this point that Bill rings again. “You know, I was thinking I might bring some of my coasters from the other house. I noticed where the girls are leaving their drinks on the wooden tables there are some rather ugly ring marks. Could you get some furniture polish when you’re in the shop—the beeswax, not the awful chemical kind? I’ll make a start when you get back from the shop.”
Chapter Five
Lila is not sure now how it started—probably her inability to combine the various remote controls and television options since Dan, or Tech Desk, as the girls used to call him, left—but for some months now Lila has been watching a Spanish soap opera, or telenovela. Most nights, if she can scrape an hour between shepherding the girls to bed and before she is too tired to see, she curls up on the sofa and watches a subtitled episode ofLa Familia Esperanza, an endlessly twisting narrative involving insanely glamorous Spanish-speaking women locked in intense warfare with each other and with the men they love. Everyone is dressed in vibrant colors, the weather is always warm, and the cast throw insults and pieces of furniture at each other with the joyful abandon of toddlers in a ball pit. Lila’s favorite is Estella Esperanza, a tiny fierce wife the same age as Lila, who looks a little like Salma Hayek. She had been a downtrodden mouse in the first six episodes, but then discovered her husband, Rodrigo, had been cheating on her with his teenage secretary. After numerous episodes of wailing grief,the consolation of her sisters, and prayers in the local church, she has morphed into a vengeful angel, who tracks her husband and his paramour and thinks up endlessly inventive ways in which to hijack their new life together.
This week, having discovered that Rodrigo and Isabella are to go on a romantic trip to a seaside resort, she has somehow gained employment as a temporary maid at the luxury hotel, and filled the Nespresso coffee capsules in their room with laxatives. The episode prior to this, she had hired a male escort to flirt with Isabella at a bar, making sure that Rodrigo walked in on it. Estella, meanwhile, has been taking shooting lessons at a local gun range, helped, of course, by a hot but sympathetic tutor, and it is clearly only a matter of time before she pulls her stylish little pistol from her designer handbag and gives her husband what he deserves. But, for now, Rodrigo suspects nothing, because he believes his wife to be a downtrodden mouse. Sometimes Lila pictures herself in Estella’s place, dressed in black, looking somehow stylish and wounded, striding through the playground scattering incriminating photographs of her former husband and yelling insults that sound so much better in Spanish or, on her worse days, pulling a gun from her designer handbag (she doesn’t have a designer handbag) and just…well, scaring them all a little.
She doesn’t talk about this little fantasy, not since she’d blurted it out to Eleanor one morning and Eleanor had stopped in her tracks and asked,Are you okay?But she keeps watching, willing Estella to do wilder and more terrible things, even as she sits in her tracksuit bottoms, with dog hair all over them, her hair pulled back in a scrunchie.
•••
Celie does nottalk to Lila for the next three days. She arrives home from school almost by subterfuge, letting herself in silently so that sometimes Lila only realizes she’s back when she hears Bill asking whether she’d like a drink and reminding her that she really should bedrinking more water. Celie has avoided supper once, saying she was too busy with schoolwork, and on the other two evenings she sat at the table, eyes cast resolutely down, as if she wished she was anywhere but there. Lila has searched her room twice, found no sign of drugs and felt weirdly guilty the whole time she was doing it. Part of her is afraid to talk to Celie in case she gives anything away.
“You were just the same, darling,” Bill says, when Celie briefly leaves the table for the bathroom.
“I was not.”
“Oh, yes. You went silent for about two years. Drove your mother completely potty. And then you got to seventeen and started talking again. She’ll come round. It’s just very complicated being sixteen.”
She doesn’t tell Bill about the weed. He can barely cope with the idea of the girls drinking cola. Besides, he’s preoccupied. He has decided, he announces over dinner, that he would like to tidy the garden. “I thought we could make it a memorial garden. Or at least a corner of it. It would be nice to have somewhere we can sit and commune with nature and remember your grandmother.”
“Next door’s cat poos in our garden,” says Violet, who has been quietly burying pieces of carrot under her steamed chicken. “There’s a LOT of nature in that corner.”
“Well, I’ll spray some citronella. That tends to put them off.”
“There’s still lots of poo in the ground, though. Loads of it. You could probably grow a whole poo baby out of the amount of poo in our garden. An enormous poo baby.”
Bill is briefly flummoxed by this conversational turn, and Lila is grateful. Doing the garden is going to involve money, and she has reached the point at which she cannot think about finance without a huge anxiety knot landing, like a bowling ball, in her stomach. Emergency plumbers are costing hundreds every month just to keep the loos functioning. The sums she needs simply to exist reach dizzying amounts.And she is still no nearer to creating an outline for her new book about the apparently relentless joy of being a single mother.
“What do you think about a memorial garden, Celie?” Bill says gently.
Celie has returned, and quietly moved her knife and fork to the center of the plate. “Sure.”
